This issue’s main feature are three commissions that Ateliers Jean Nouvel has completed over the past three decades for Arab clients in Paris and the Gulf States: National Museum of Qatar, Louvre Abu Dhabi, and Institut du Monde Arabe. The projects embody the skill with which the office gives a fresh spin on traditional themes while creating a sense of place that enhances the site, and are notable for their abstraction of themes in Islamic architecture in creating a fusion of new and old, indigenous and Western.
This issue of a+u magazine also profiles several recent buildings by Valerio Olgiati, Frank Gehry, Smiljan Radić, BIG, Peter Märkli, Peter Zumthor, and Eduardo Souto de Moura.
